Body armour is widely used in many sport and non-sporting applications to provide a level of protection from impact for the wearer. Conventional body armour consists of a hard plastics outer shell, injection moulded, blow moulded or thermoformed, with a lining of a softer compressible material, e.g. foamed material. The lining provides cushioning whilst the outer shell helps to distribute the impact load across a wider area, thus reducing direct, point loading. Body armour is normally secured to the wearer by means of strapping closure systems, e.g. elastic straps, touch and close fastenings, or by enclosure within garments worn by the user. A number of companies have, over the years, produced shock absorbing/energy protection devices in body armour and footwear utilising a honeycomb construction bonded to a rigid skin. The honeycomb structure consisting of hexagonal cells occurs in nature, e.g. by bees and wasps to make strong, lightweight, protective enclosures. The abstraction of good design from nature is the basis of biomimetics as applied in such disciplines as chemistry, engineering and materials science. Hence, honeycomb constructions bonded to an outer skin or skins are widely used in the aerospace and motor industries due to their superb lightweight/stiffness capability. In such cases, the honeycomb is bonded to the outer skin or skins by welding, adhesives or the like, and the bonding process adds considerably to the cost of production of the final product. U.S. Pat. No. 4,610,034 discloses a thin flexible lightweight protective pad for insertion into a pocket of a garment. The pad may have recesses of various shapes formed in one surface, thereby forming an integral structure similar to the above described skin/honeycomb constructions. The soft polyurethane foam material of the pad is readily deformable to allow for enhanced deceleration periods on impact and to provide a restoring force so that it does not “bottom-out” and act as a hard surface. The recesses are provided to allow for expansion or bulging of the material of the pad into those recesses. The object of the structure is to absorb recoil loads from a rifle, such loads being applied to the pad over the surface of the butt of the rifle. Such a readily deformable pad would not provide the required protection from point loads, e.g. bullet strikes, or loads applied over very small areas.